Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Chapter 16

Summary: Chapter 16

The police leave Bernard, Helmholtz, and John
in Mond’s office. Mond arrives and says to John, “So you don’t much
like civilization, Mr. Savage.” John concedes, but admits that he
does like some things, such as the constant sound of music. Mond
responds with a quote from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Sometimes
a thousand twangling instruments will hum about my ears and sometimes
voices.” John is pleasantly surprised to find that Mond has read
Shakespeare.

Mond points out that Shakespeare is a forbidden text.
In response to John’s questioning, he explains that such literature
is banned for a number of reasons. In the first place, beautiful
things, such as great literature, tend to last. People continue
to like them even when they become quite old. A society based on
consumerism, such as the World State, needs citizens who want new
things. Newness is thus more important than intrinsic value, and
high art must be suppressed to make room for the new. In the second
place, the citizens of the World State would not be able to understand
Shakespeare, because the stories he writes are based on experiences
and passions that do not exist in the World State. Grand struggles
and overpowering emotions have been sacrificed in favor of social
stability. They have been replaced by what Mond calls “happiness,”
by which he means the infantile gratification of appetites.

John is inclined to think that this brand of happiness
creates monstrous and repulsive human beings. He challenges the
Director, asking whether the citizens couldn’t at least all be created
as Alphas. Mond replies that the World State has to have citizens
who will be happy performing the functions that they have been assigned,
and since Alphas are only happy doing Alpha (i.e., intellectual)
work, the vast majority of the population actually has to be degraded
and made stupid so that they will be happy with their place in life.
He points to an experiment in which an entire island was populated with
Alphas, and wholesale civil war quickly ensued, because none of
the citizens were ever happy with the distribution of tasks.

Although the World State is a technotopia, meaning
that it is made possible by technologies vastly more advanced than
our own, Mond explains that even technology has to be kept under
rigorous controls for the happy and stable society to be possible.
Past a certain point, even labor-saving technologies have had to
be suppressed to maintain a balance between labor and leisure. Keeping
citizens happy requires keeping them at work for a certain amount
of time.

Science has also had to be suppressed to create the happy
and stable society. This is particularly ironic because World State
citizens are taught to revere science as one of their most fundamental
values. However, none of them—not even Alphas such as Helmholtz
and Bernard—actually possess any scientific training, so they really don’t
even know what science is. Mond doesn’t explain what it is, although
he alludes to his own career as a young scientist who got himself
into trouble by challenging conventional wisdom. One can infer that
by “science,” Mond means the search for knowledge by means of the
experimental method. Science cannot exist in the World State because
the search for “truth” conflicts with happiness. This is very suggestive,
because it implies that the entire society is somehow built upon
lies, but he is tantalizingly unclear about what truths and what
lies he is talking about.

Mond tells Helmholtz and Bernard that they will be exiled.
Bernard begins to beg and plead for Mond to change his sentence. Three
men drag him away to sedate him with soma. Mond
says that Bernard does not know that exile is actually a reward.
The islands are full of the most interesting people in the world,
individuals who did not fit in the World State community. Mond tells
Helmholtz that he almost envies him. Helmholtz asks why,
if he is so envious, he did not choose exile when he was offered
the choice. Mond explains that he prefers the work he does in managing
the happiness of others.

More Help

Replacing the concept of a belief-based, non-verifiable being with Ford, a man who existed, eliminates all the wonder and mystery related to traditional religions.
Also eliminating all other belief systems with a single, inarguable "godhead" rids the World State citizens of anxiety and conflicts based on religious beliefs and orthodoxies.

One might say that the novels Animal Farm and Brave New
World could give useful lessons on democracy to younger teenagers. Give your
opinion on the matter. Support your opinion with evidence from the two novels.